Dish by Dish, Art of Last Meals

CORVALLIS, Ore. — One man wanted only ice water as his last meal before execution. Another asked that his mother be allowed into the prison kitchen to make the chicken dumplings he loved. Another told the guards he had never had a birthday cake, so they bought him one, along with his formal last-meal request, a pizza. Some asked for nothing, or nothing special — a regular prison dinner, food from the vending machines, a cigarette and a soda.

In 1917 in Montana, a condemned man said in the hours before his death: “I have a bad taste in my mouth. I want an apple.”

Julie Green has painted their stories — fittingly enough, on plates, in cobalt-blue paint fired to permanence — along with hundreds of other such chiaroscuro tales of food and death and choice, in a decade-long project she calls “The Last Supper.” This month, 500 of her plates, the largest show of her work ever mounted, went on display in the Arts Center, a former Episcopal church in this college town south of Portland, where Professor Green is an associate professor of art at Oregon State University.

That the world knows what a condemned person was served — indeed, that such information is often part of the narrative of the execution itself, posted on Web sites and in news articles from the prison — is what initially caught Professor Green’s attention.

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"The meals were so personal, they humanized death row for me," Ms. Green said.CreditLeah Nash for The New York Times

“The meals were so personal, they humanized death row for me,” she said.

But as she worked — spending six months of each year on the project, and making about 50 plates a year — she came to see the choice of last meal as a window into the soul in an hour of crisis, and also into the strange rituals society has attached to the ultimate punishment.

“I’m a food person,” she said. “I grew up with great cooks and great food. Food has always been a celebratory thing for me. That’s part of why this whole thing is interesting to me, because of the contrast. It’s not a celebration.”

The number of executions has declined in the United States in recent years, from a modern-era high of 98 in 1999 to 43 in 2012. Texas, which has put more people to death than any other state since capital punishment was restored in 1976 by the United States Supreme Court, stopped offering special last meals to the condemned in 2011. But the number of Professor Green’s plates keeps growing: She plans to continue painting as long as there is a death penalty.

Some of the paintings are inspired by long-ago executions, described in news clippings — like the plates she did about two black boys, ages 15 and 16, sent to the electric chair in Mississippi in 1947 on murder charges. They were given fried chicken and watermelon, the records show. Whether they requested that meal is unknown, Professor Green said, but it was dutifully recorded, and so those images — so fraught with racial baggage — went onto plates.

Other plates were painted fresh from the news, and some were completed on the day of the execution itself. Most show predictable, even mundane meals: a hamburger and fries, enchiladas, steak and baked potatoes. Others come from a place that clearly spoke only to the condemned: Four olives and a bottle of wild-berry-flavored water for one, a jar of dill pickles for another. One man asked for “God’s Word.” Another wanted “justice, equality, world peace.”

The underlying and compelling theme of the work is choice. What do people who may have lived for years in prison with virtually no choices at all do with this last one they’re offered? Do they reach back for some comforting reminder of childhood? (Professor Green suspects as much in the cases of meals like macaroni and cheese or Spam.) Do they grasp for foods never tried, or luxuries remembered or imagined? (One condemned man ordered buffalo steak and sugar-free black walnut ice cream; another, fried sac-a-lait fish topped with crawfish étouffée.)

Even choosing not to choose has meaning, with some inmates apparently seeing the last-meal question as something they simply can’t face — answering it would be acknowledging their fate.

“No final meal request because he remained hopeful to the end that he would not be executed,” Virginia prison officials recorded about a man executed there in February 2009. The plate for that man has only text.

Making a condemned person’s last meal into art is a tricky proposition, given the fierce debate about capital punishment, and Professor Green said she had sometimes been criticized for doing it. In presenting shows and lectures about the work around the country, she has been accused of trying to capitalize on the death penalty — although the project, she says, is strictly not for profit. That she makes no secret of her opposition to the continuing practice of execution probably adds its own fuel, she said.

Some years back Professor Green exhibited about 100 plates at a food and arts center in Napa, Calif., that is now closed. “Folks standing in line for foie gras at one of the finest restaurants in the U.S. were confronted with final meals,” she said in an e-mail. Many responded positively, she added, “but others wrote that the exhibit was ruining their appetite.” One visitor called Professor Green a “stinky hippie” and told her to go back to Oregon. “I keep all the comment books,” she said.

But where some critics might see an unduly sympathetic portrait of people convicted of heinous crimes, David Huff, the executive director of the Arts Center in Corvallis, said he saw humanity with all its flaws and foibles. “I don’t think it excuses actions,” he said. “They may have done really bad things.”

“But regardless of what you think about it, you have to accept that these are people,” he added. “They were actual people with likes and dislikes — liking pizza and Coke, or shrimp.”

“The Last Supper” closes in Corvallis, Ore., on Feb. 16, and will then travel to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, in Eugene, Ore.